StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Desktop Development
  5. Electron vs wxWidgets

Electron vs wxWidgets

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Electron
Electron
Stacks11.6K
Followers10.0K
Votes148
wxWidgets
wxWidgets
Stacks21
Followers75
Votes19
GitHub Stars6.9K
Forks1.9K

Electron vs wxWidgets: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Electron and wxWidgets are two popular frameworks used for developing desktop applications. While both serve the same purpose, there are key differences that developers should consider before choosing one over the other. 

1. **Programming Language**: Electron is primarily used with web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, making it a suitable choice for web developers. On the other hand, wxWidgets can be used with various programming languages like C++, Python, and others, providing more flexibility in language choice for developers.

2. **Platform Support**: Electron is known for providing excellent cross-platform support, allowing developers to build applications that can run on Windows, macOS, and Linux seamlessly. In contrast, wxWidgets also supports multiple platforms but may require additional configurations and adjustments to achieve consistent performance across different operating systems.

3. **Rendering Engine**: Electron uses Chromium as its rendering engine, providing a modern and robust platform for building feature-rich applications. Conversely, wxWidgets utilizes native GUI components of the underlying operating system, offering a more traditional look and feel to the applications developed with it.

4. **Development Environment**: Electron offers a streamlined development environment with tools like Electron Builder for packaging applications efficiently. In comparison, wxWidgets requires configuring different build systems based on the chosen programming language, which can increase development complexity and time.

5. **Community and Documentation**: Electron boasts a large and active community, with extensive documentation and a wide range of third-party resources available to developers. In contrast, while wxWidgets also has a supportive community, it may not have the same level of resources and documentation as Electron due to its more specialized use cases.

6. **Performance**: Electron applications may face some criticism for higher resource consumption due to the underlying Chromium engine. On the other hand, wxWidgets applications are known for their lightweight nature and efficient use of system resources, making them a preferred choice for resource-constrained environments.

In Summary, Electron and wxWidgets differ in programming language support, platform compatibility, rendering engine, development environment, community resources, and performance characteristics, providing developers with a variety of factors to consider when choosing a framework for desktop application development.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Electron
Electron
wxWidgets
wxWidgets

With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.

It is a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base. It has popular language bindings for Python, Perl, Ruby and many other languages, and unlike other cross-platform toolkits, it gives applications a truly native look and feel because it uses the platform's native API rather than emulating the GUI. It's also extensive, free, open-source and mature.

Use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Chromium and Node.js to build your app.;Electron is open source; maintained by GitHub and an active community.;Electron apps build and run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.;Automatic updates;Crash reporting;Windows installers;Debugging & profiling;Native menus & notifications
Support for gesture events (GSoC 2017 project); Getting JavaScript code return value from wxWebView (also GSoC 2017 project); New wxSecretStore class for securely storing user passwords; New, available in parallel with the existing one, CMake build system; Support for context-sensitive translations.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
6.9K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.9K
Stacks
11.6K
Stacks
21
Followers
10.0K
Followers
75
Votes
148
Votes
19
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 69
    Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications
  • 53
    Open source
  • 14
    Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code
  • 8
    Because it's cross platform
  • 4
    Use Node.js in the Main Process
Cons
  • 19
    Uses a lot of memory
  • 8
    User experience never as good as a native app
  • 4
    Does not native
  • 4
    No proper documentation
  • 1
    Each app needs to install a new chromium + nodejs
Pros
  • 5
    Native looking UI
  • 4
    Learning Curve
  • 3
    Cross platform
  • 2
    Open source
  • 2
    Permissive license. Commercial with static linkage.
Cons
  • 1
    Uses Qt for GUI (wxQt)
Integrations
No integrations available
Perl
Perl
C++
C++
Windows
Windows
Linux
Linux
Python
Python
macOS
macOS
Ruby
Ruby

What are some alternatives to Electron, wxWidgets?

Sciter

Sciter

It brings a stack of web technologies to desktop UI development. Web designers, and developers, can reuse their experience and expertise in creating modern looking desktop applications.

Qt5

Qt5

It is a full development framework with tools designed to streamline the creation of applications and user interfaces for desktop, embedded, and mobile platforms.

JavaFX

JavaFX

It is a set of graphics and media packages that enables developers to design, create, test, debug, and deploy rich client applications that operate consistently across diverse platforms.

React Native Desktop

React Native Desktop

Build OS X desktop apps using React Native.

JUCE

JUCE

It is a C++ framework for low-latency applications, with cross-platform GUI libraries to get your apps running on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.

Proton Native

Proton Native

Create native desktop applications through a React syntax, on all platforms.

NodeGUI

NodeGUI

It is an open source library for building cross-platform native desktop applications with JavaScript and CSS like styling. It is based on Qt5 and NOT chromium, hence it is memory and cpu efficient.

pygame

pygame

It is a cross-platform set of Python modules designed for writing video games. It includes computer graphics and sound libraries designed to be used with the Python programming language.

SDL

SDL

It is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D.

Element

Element

Element is a Vue 2.0 based component library for developers, designers and product managers, with a set of design resources.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase